Theatre

Complicite's tricks

How to be both established and experimental

THEATRICAL experiments are plentiful but few last. Theatre companies that set off bristling with the desire for change often fall by the wayside. They start as a breath of fresh air but seldom stay fresh. Complicite is one of the rare exceptions.

The group known as Théâtre de Complicité (it simplified its name about seven years ago) began in the 1980s as a collective of Paris-trained actors who broke the rules of text-based, theme-driven drama. The emphasis was on movement, mime and clowning. None of the early shows had a written text. They had a larky, cartoon quality and were wickedly satirical.

In the 1990s the group became more theatrically self-conscious. “The Street of Crocodiles” (1992), based on the life and work of Bruno Schulz, a Polish writer, and, two years later, “The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol”, after a story by John Berger, displayed technical bravura as well as careful acting. More recently, shows such as “Mnemonic” (1999), inspired by a corpse preserved from the Ice Age, and “The Noise of Time” (2000), about Shostakovich, were quieter, even contemplative. All the plays are collaborations between Simon McBurney, the group's British-born founder-member, and his chosen actors. But Mr McBurney, now 50, is sole artistic director and usually the source of the idea from which each show grows.

His latest play, “A Disappearing Number”, is about the five years that a self-taught Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan, spent at Cambridge University and his relationship with a maths professor at Trinity College, G.H. Hardy. Ramanujan's ideas had astounded Hardy when the young Indian first wrote to him. After arriving in Cambridge in 1913, Ramanujan worked brilliantly for a time but, a strict Hindu and vegetarian, he was unable to adapt to wartime England and died, back in India, aged 32.

After reading Hardy's autobiography “A Mathematician's Apology”, Mr McBurney says he became fascinated by what he calls maths's uncertainty: “Ramanujan had an imaginative connection with maths. This, I came to understand, is very much an Indian thing: enjoyment of maths there is part of enjoying life.” In his play he has been careful not to burden the audience with too much mathematical theory; rather, he portrays the loneliness of genius, the human need to be rooted— and the playfulness of maths.

Given Mr McBurney's intensely visual approach to drama, combining abstract ideas with theatrical tricks was inevitable. Simple chairs, for instance, become train carriages or aeroplane seats. Four plots interweave: the story of Ramanujan in Cambridge; the desire of Ruth, a modern-day lecturer, to have children; an Indian businessman returning from Los Angeles to the subcontinent; an Indian scientist visiting CERN, a particle-physics laboratory.

A huge oblong lecture-board becomes a revolving flap through which the nine actors walk from one story, time-zone or culture to another. The play is also funny: in a subplot, a man called Al accidentally locks himself into the lecture room and strikes up a friendship with a woman in an Indian call centre. If anything, too much is going on, with ideas unfolding at dazzling speed but not always coalescing.

This might change in London, where the show opens next week after touring festivals in Vienna and Amsterdam in the spring. Reshaping a play—trimming storylines, expanding others, right up to the last minute—is typical of Complicite. “Work develops all the time,” says Mr McBurney. “Ideas are gradually refined until you begin to understand what you've made.” Mr McBurney has turned his company into a brand name that is invited all over the world but everything it does still resounds with the exuberant, sometimes wayward, notes of experiment.

“A Disappearing Number” opens at the Barbican Centre, London, on September 5th.